The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero

Oedipus still dominates the psychoanalytic imagination, though Ulysses is a more central to Western tradition, from Homer to Joyce and Kazantzakis. W. B. Stanford’s delightfully readable and erudite, survey of the Ulysses figure revolutionizes conventional accounts of this hero. For here is a Ulysses with closer ties to wife, mother, nymphs, and goddesses than his fellow warriors, a faithful husband who dallies with seductive enchantresses, a man of valor who wins by deceit—the Trojan Horse. In his brilliantly challenging foreword, “The Classicist and the Psychopath,” Charles Boer brings the hero’s wanderings up to the twenty-first century by examining the strange fascination of academics with Ulysses and exposing the peculiar prejudices that are hidden in Classical scholarship.